which offered the therapeutic power of morphine without the risk of addiction. This claim was later dropped when experience revealed that heroin was anything but non-addictive.
Cocaine became popular after yet another German chemist perfected a method for isolating it from coca leaves in 1859. The ready availability of cheap cocaine in the late nineteenth century triggered a global surge in its recreational use.
Sigmund Freud has the dubious honour of being a pioneering and enthusiastic advocate of cocaine. In 1884 Freud published a notorious paper entitled ‘Über coca’ (‘On Coca’), in which he claimed that cocaine could alleviate or cure a wide range of disorders including indigestion, nervous debility, wasting, alcoholism, morphine addiction and impotence. He confidently asserted that the drug’s therapeutic benefits far outweighed any possible risks from excessive use. Freud practised what he preached, taking large quantities of cocaine himself and prescribing it to many of his patients and friends. One of them was Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, whose morphine addiction Freud attempted to cure with cocaine. Unfortunately, Freud succeeded only in transforming his hapless friend into a cocaine addict and, subsequently, a corpse.
Before long, Freud was being accused of unleashing a new and dreadful type of addiction. When another of his patients died from an overdose of cocaine, Freud eased off administering the drug intravenously, although he continued to give it orally. In a paper published in 1887, he insisted that cocaine addiction was not an inherent property of the drug itself, but rather of the individual who took it. One of the few medical applications for which cocaine could be used safely was as a local anaesthetic. However, Freud failed to recognise the clinical significance of this at the time, leaving one of his Viennese rivals to take the credit and win international fame. Despite clear evidence that cocaine did not cure addiction, but was itself highly addictive, Freud continued to take the drug for relief from his migraines and a painful nasal condition. In letters to friends, he wrote of how applying cocaine to his left nostril had helped him ‘to an amazing extent’ and of his need for ‘a lot of cocaine’. Some uncharitable sceptics have suggested that Freud’s now largely discredited theories about the nature of the human mind might have been inspired by his consumption of this psychoactive drug.
A largely forgotten feature of the nineteenth-century drug scene was the widespread use of medical anaesthetics for recreational purposes. One of the many discoveries made by the great English scientist Sir Humphry Davy was nitrous oxide, otherwise known as laughing gas. Davy pioneered its use as an anaesthetic. He also liked to entertain himself and his friends by getting high on it. In 1800, he described how inhaling the gas produced a feeling of detachment that lifted him from his earthly cares and caused him to pass, ‘through voluptuous transitions’, into sensations that were completely new to him. Davy’s friends even contemplated setting up a ‘nitrous oxide tavern’, in which punters could inhale the gas as an alternative to getting drunk on alcohol. Some London theatres offered patrons a blast of nitrous oxide to put them in the mood before a show. Much the same happened with chloroform, which was being used for purely recreational purposes barely a year after it had first been employed as a medical anaesthetic.
Ether was another anaesthetic that enjoyed a vogue as a recreational drug. During the second half of the nineteenth century it became especially popular in Ireland, after Catholic temperance campaigners decreed that it was an acceptable alternative to alcohol – ‘a liquor on which a man might get drunk with a clear conscience’, as one priest put it. Up until 1890, when ether was classified as a poison, the Irish were drinking more than 17,000 gallons of the stuff each year. The occultist Aleister Crowley (of whom more later) liked to drink a morning ‘bracer’ consisting of half a pint of ether, brandy, kirsch, absinthe and Tabasco sauce.
When swallowed, ether has an intoxicating effect comparable to that of alcohol. The intoxication is short-lived, however. It disappears within half an hour or so, leaving the drinker sober. Some ether-drinkers regarded this as an advantage. Others did not. Drinking ether could also be hazardous. The boiling point of ether is lower than body temperature, so it vaporises on contact with the inside of the mouth. Drinking it therefore tends to generate highly flammable belches and farts. In an age when drinkers were surrounded by naked flames, this could prove life-threatening. According to an account from Russia, where ether drinking was popular, one such explosion killed six people. The social attractiveness of ether-drinkers was further diminished by the drug’s side-effect of generating rivers of saliva. This led some users to inhale its vapours in preference to drinking it.
Many more new drugs appeared on the scene in the twentieth century, including LSD and a host of other hallucinogens. LSD, otherwise known as lysergic acid diethylamide, was first made in 1938 by a Swiss chemist who was searching for new medicines. Its brain-popping psychedelic effects only became apparent a few years later. During the 1950s and 1960s, extensive research was conducted into the possible therapeutic uses of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. Psychiatrists prescribed LSD to tens of thousands of patients to help them overcome a range of mental health problems. One of these patients was the Hollywood star Cary Grant, who later said that LSD had helped him deal with the trauma of his marriage break-up. Evidence from several hundred medical studies published during this period suggests that, for some patients at least, hallucinogenic drugs could assist in the treatment of some forms of addiction, psychosomatic illness, anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of the pioneers in this field was the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who coined the term psychedelic (as in ‘consciousness-expanding’). Osmond thought that powerful hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD might enable addicts to view their situation in a totally new way, creating a strong motivation to transform their behaviour and quit their drug or alcohol habit. In the 1950s, Osmond and colleagues had some success in using single doses of LSD to treat alcoholics. In one of their studies, two-thirds of the alcoholic patients stopped drinking for at least eighteen months following a single dose of LSD – an outcome that compared favourably with more conventional treatments for alcoholism.
LSD became illegal in the late 1960s. Before long, research into its potential therapeutic applications ground to a halt, as scientists found it increasingly difficult to obtain permission or funding to work on the drug. Pharmaceutical companies were not attracted by such research, because LSD and other hallucinogens were unprotected by patents. Moreover, the drugs were administered only once or a few times, not taken daily over long periods, which meant they had limited potential to make money.
More recently, research into the therapeutic potential of hallucinogenic drugs has been showing some signs of revival. One of the few studies to be published since the 1960s looked at the use of hallucinogens for treating cluster headaches. Individuals with this debilitating condition suffer from strings of excruciatingly painful headaches, driving some of them to commit suicide. Anecdotal evidence suggested that some sufferers obtained relief, lasting up to several months, from a single small dose of LSD or psilocybin. The doses were insufficient to cause full-blown hallucinations. When researchers from Harvard Medical School interviewed a large sample of people who had sought relief in this way, the results were startling: 85 per cent of those who had taken psilocybin reported that it stopped their headache attacks and 80 per cent of LSD-users found that the remission periods between attacks became longer. LSD and psilocybin appeared to be more effective at staving off further attacks than conventional migraine medicines.
A unique historical perspective on humanity’s use of recreational drugs can be found in The Seven Sisters of Sleep, a remarkable book written in 1860 by an English scientist named Mordecai Cubitt Cooke. Lewis Carroll is thought to have used it as a source for the psychedelic episodes in Alice in Wonderland.
Cooke presents a scholarly survey of the seven principal narcotics of the world. These were, in descending order of popularity at the time, tobacco, opium, cannabis, betel nut, coca, thorn apple and fly agaric. (Note the absence of alcohol.) According
